“Bloodline nomenclature usually is. Not a lot of outside opinions involved. And it’s got nothing to do with hell, or fire—it’s the decomposing effluvia of the gods. These jokers can control it—some shady deal must’ve gone down, centuries ago—but they can’t get too far from Eth, or it dries right up. Why they’re eating people, I have no idea. That is entirely unrelated.”
He dropped down on the carpet of corpses. “Once again, Ashlan Ley, you prove remarkably well-informed for a small-time con artist.”
“I’m a lot of things.”
The ring had a circumference of fifteen corpses, give or take a few limbs. Those at the edges were thoroughly crisped, but the rest seemed unharmed by their proximity.
“Is there any way we can take it with us?” Hollis asked. “Just enough to cold-roast an eyeball or two, or maybe a gonad. I certainly wouldn’t want to be as quick dispatching the Puppeteer as that hairless procreator was with this lot. Swallowing one of his favorite bits with cold fire, though—well, it appeals to my aesthetic sense.”
The Puppeteer again. Every few minutes, Hollis looped back to the subject of his “creator,” concocting ever more elaborate fantasies about his death.
Luckily, he hadn’t noticed how uneasy this made her—he was too fixated on bloody vengeance for that—but Ashlan was increasingly eager to get all this over with.
Maybe he’d unravel along the way and save her some trouble.
That thought unnerved her, too.
“I mean, you could always ask the Devourers,” she muttered. “The last one seemed chatty enough.”
He turned on a platform heel, suddenly petulant. “Yes, and about them, Ashlan Ley. You ought to’ve slaughtered those depilated creeps—wrung their greasy heads right off their necks! There’d be two fewer captors to escape right about now.”
“When we got here,” she said, as patiently as she could manage, “you were telling me to pull the heads off the black-cloaks. Imagine where that would have landed us, Runt—once the Devourers showed up, we’d have been caught between the two clans. ‘Kill it if it moves’ isn’t going to get us to Eth.”
“It’ll get us there faster than allowing ourselves to be imprisoned by every pack of half-wits patrolling the wood!” He climbed onto a dead soldier’s back and gave it a petulant stomp. “I simply can’t understand why you allow all this. For my sake, I’m glad that you didn’t dispatch those junkies—but why did you allow them to ransack your chest cavity, when knocking off the two of them would’ve cost you nothing?”
“It’s just—easier. Laying low. Keeping the spotlight off me—and what I can do. People take what they want, and they go away.”
“That’s a flimsy argument,” Hollis muttered. “Pain seems hardly to bother you at all, and from what I can tell, there’s not a weapon in the kingdom that can waylay you for long, if you set your mind to it.”
She decided to let him believe that as long as he could.
“All of which makes your—your pacifism completely incomprehensible,” he went on. “Such strength you have, such resiliency, and such size! Why not cut down everything in your path? Why not let the world know what you can do? What good can you do for me—for yourself? for anyone?—if we’re bound by a cage of uncanny fire? And what difference could the destruction of your body possibly matter when you’re an hour away from wholeness, regardless of how much damage you take?”
“It ought to matter to you, if you’re hiding in my handbag.”
But she knew the answer well enough. The thought had haunted her since childhood.
What if she started killing, and couldn’t stop?
“I don’t know, Runt.” Ashlan stood, wincing. Her feet were all pins and needles. “I guess I might still be standing after I took on two dozen men. I’ve never tried it.” She hobbled to the edge of the ring, peering down at the gruesome litter of the battle. “But I do know this: the second the Devourers lit me up, you’d be a lump of fucking coal.”
She found what she was looking for: a severed arm, hacked off at the elbow. She chucked it into the wall of flame, where it crackled and shook, then rebounded.
Hollis stepped away from the cold, smoking twist of bone and gristle, his upper lip curling. “Well. Perhaps necromancers are a special case. But should we encounter a militia, for example, or an irregular group of bandits—”
“How many hits do you think I can take before you get skewered?” She found another severed limb and hefted it. “What if I drop you, and you get stepped on? Really, Runt, all it’s going to take is one good whack, and your century’s over. Plus, we’ve got these two to keep alive,” she said, waving the leg at the woman and the boy, “or we lose our shot at the Puppeteer. Right?”
She could see him marshaling an argument.
It died on his lips as she rammed the leg into the wall.
The limb leapt into the air the moment it touched hellfire. Grappling it, bracing with all her might, she rammed it through the squealing resistance until it finally popped through the other side. She yanked her hands back before they touched the flame, feeling grimly satisfied.
“Ashlan, what are you doing?”
“Experimenting. We’ve got to figure a way out of here that doesn’t fry the three of you.”
“How is that meant to help?”
“I’ll keep you posted.” She wiped her hands on her tunic. “I was kind of hoping some space would open up around it. But at least we know it’s not a wall. There’s a lot of push-back, but I could get myself through if I really had to.”
She pictured herself charred, still lurching on. Or falling down and being left alone a while.
It would be better to avoid it entirely. Hellfire didn’t seem like it offered the kind of pain she cared to deal with.
To her surprise, Hollis was seething. “So you’re openly planning on leaving me to die here,” he said, flexing his little fists. “After all I’ve offered you.”
“Easy, Runt.” She came to his side, kneeling until she was as close to his level as she could get. “No one’s ditching you. Worst case, I just—bury you, burn myself alive, and dig you up again when the Devourers are gone.”
He looked aghast for a moment, then guffawed. “God’s rot, woman, what a plan! But I can’t very well cry claustrophobia after asking you to dive unarmed into a small army of mages. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, eh?” Climbing over the corpses, he inspected the sleeping bodies. “As you noted, the real challenge will be keeping the junkies alive. They know where the Puppeteer is, and we don’t—so we can’t just let them burn, delightful as that might be. But are you sure they’re even stable?”
Ashlan wasn’t sure of anything, not in here. “I mean, I’ve used blood to keep someone alive in a pinch before. But they’ve always had medical attention after, from people with more field experience than me. I don’t know how far it goes on its own.” She lifted up the woman’s cloak and winced. “This one isn’t looking good. There are some things on the outside that ought to be in, if we’re going to start tossing her around. I got some of my blood down her throat, but she really does need—packing.”
“I’m really more of an unpacker,” he said, smiling. “Surely you can manage it?”
Ashlan looked down at her hands. “I’m not exactly hygienic. And I don’t have the tools.”
“Can’t you just—” He gestured vaguely. “I don’t know, bleed on her?”
“You want me to, what, cut off a hand and hose her down?”
He paused, considering. “Would that work?”
Ashlan sighed. “I would much rather not find out.”
The two of them were sleeping soundly, at least—Ashlan’s blood had a peculiarly soporific effect. And they looked almost childlike in repose.
The boy was olive-skinned, his nose aquiline, hair more curly than kinky. The woman was pale and road-worn, the sort of customer Ashlan could imagine reminiscing about some bygone crown her ancestors had never actually worn.
These were t
he people who’d scrapped her body to get themselves high. She’d expected to feel hatred, or at least some defensive twinge, but there was nothing. She’d have been more upset if they’d stolen her bag.
“I think the boy might be all right,” she said. “Do we really need both of them?”
“Hmm. What with all the Ace-ing and Deuce-ing, I think it’d be safer—if only to avoid suspicion down the line.” Hollis tapped his lips with a frayed forefinger. “Patch her up, and be quick about it. Meantime, I’ll try and find us a way out of this infernal cage.”
“Great.” She watched him toddle over to the edge of the hellfire, thinking idly of tossing him over and seeing if he survived the fall. Instead, she pulled Rafe’s dagger out of the dirt, wiped it passably clean, and held it to her wrist, frowning down at the woman’s face.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this for you,” she whispered.
The cut was deep and confident, the blood intoxicatingly dark.
Ashlan appreciated how steady her arm remained. She felt her breath changing as her body flooded with panic, then nausea, then warmth. She noted that hideous certainty that always arrived when she began to take herself apart.
There is no end to this, it said.
The pain itself was like an old friend walking through the front door, telling the same jokes that made her laugh every time.
Then, hot on its heels, the hunger.
Again, she felt a curious pang—which warranted no reflection, because she was already wrapping it up, clenching her teeth and clamping her fingers around her forearm. It seemed like the woman had already absorbed enough of Ashlan’s blood—she was breathing more steadily, her innards retracting, her black puncture blanching.
It would have to do. There was nothing clean to bandage her with, so if she fell apart when they moved her, so be it. They had no plan that could possibly get her out of this ring, anyway, and it could only be a matter of time before the Devourers returned.
Ashlan felt that boiling well of heat that always lay just below the surface of her skin. Over the years, she’d built a kind of wall to keep it from lashing out and healing every scrape she suffered. People reacted poorly, she’d learned as a child, when confronted with a regenerating girl.
And there were times when she just wanted to hurt awhile.
Now, with a long exhalation, she let the wall down.
Her arm began at once to prickle with emerging sweat. Her flesh seared, her mind went blank, and within moments she had a knitting wound and a splitting headache.
“Ashlan,” Hollis rasped.
“Give me a minute,” she muttered, pressing her temples.
What she wouldn’t give for a rack of lamb right now.
“Ashlan!”
She whipped her head around, furious, famished, thinking how nice it would be to bite him until he shut his tiny mouth.
But Hollis was staggering backwards, tripping over corpses, scrambling up and doing it again.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from the wall of flame.
It was moving toward the middle—quickly enough to gnaw through two or three lengthwise corpses every minute.
Ashlan stood, whispering a curse. The hellfire sizzled through the bodies at the edge, one cold, implacable inch at a time. She lifted Hollis, who squawked in indignation as she retreated to the center of the circle, watching it cinch toward them.
Down, she thought. That’s all she could think, as if a magnet was pulling her from below. She had to get him down.
“Guess it’s feeding time,” she said, setting him down near the boy’s feet. “We’ve got a few minutes, if we’re lucky.” Grunting, she heaved a corpse off of the matted grass. “Forget these two. We’ll find another way. Let’s get you in the ground. We need to start digging.”
“With what?” cried Hollis.
“I don’t know,” she shouted back. “Look around!”
Hollis ducked as a hideous screeching erupted at the edge of the ring. The hellfire had caught a dying black-cloak where he lay. From the feet up, his flesh was turning to char, but the man was too weak to pull himself away.
Ashlan picked up the dagger and started hacking at the ground, though she didn’t manage much besides loosening the grass. The earth was hard and rocky, and scraping it with the blade didn’t gain her enough ground.
“Nothing but sharpened sticks,” Hollis called from the edge, “and a satchel of your guts.”
“Grab a stick,” said Ashlan, dropping the blade. “Maybe I can get some leverage, break things up a bit.”
Hollis hefted a makeshift spear, balancing like a tiny acrobat as he made his way across the corpses.
“Damn it, Runt, you’re slow.” Ashlan lunged toward him, swiping the stick from his hands. “I can’t dig and keep track of you at the same time.”
She snatched up the satchel of guts, too, and tossed them toward the center. She didn’t feel like listening to them sizzle—not before the rest of her did.
Ashlan sank the stick into the unforgiving earth.
She pushed, and it snapped in half.
The black-cloak wasn’t screeching any more. The hellfire had swallowed his skull.
“Stay close,” she shouted, kneeling and clawing at the rocky dirt with her hands, earning nothing but dry, stingy palmfuls at first. She kept on, though, clenching her jaw so hard that her neck spasmed.
Before she’d cleared an inch, her fingers were bleeding. The earth was so studded with stones that she’d torn off several fingernails by the time she had anything she could call a hole. Pouring with sweat, she held back the full rush of heat and dug deeper, not even pausing to glance at the tightening hellfire. She dug until her fingers were pulped, then kept digging, flinging dirt beside her, hoping it was landing in something like a pile. She’d have to pack it over Hollis’ body again, and it would need to be deep enough to protect him from the flames that would soon be closing over his head.
How deep could the hellfire reach? The further she went, the more futile all this felt.
She felt a harsh vibration running through her arms as her naked finger-bones scraped the surface of a stone even wider than the hole she’d dug.
“Hurry,” pleaded Hollis.
“Toss me the dagger, Runt.”
Gripping its hilt with fingers like gory talons, she fought through the pain, gouging desperately at the edges of the stone. “Even if this works,” shouted Ashlan, “we’re going to need to find another way to Eth. I might just be able to get you under, but these two—”
“Just dig!” yelled Hollis, hunched beside her.
Grunting, she pried up the edge of the stone. It loosened a good bit of earth as she wrenched it free.
She hauled it up, and her heart sank. Even if Hollis curled up like a fetus, the pit was still too shallow.
“There won’t be time to bury an acorn,” he moaned.
The wall of hellfire was ten feet away, starting on one of the pale woman’s outstretched hands. She wasn’t awake, but she was shrieking.
And the boy was next.
“We’re fucked,” Ashlan said. Out of sheer frustration, she hurled the stone back into the pit, where it thudded—and then kept falling.
She and Hollis turned to stare at the sudden hole in the ground.
“What enchantment is this?” he cried.
“I don’t know.” She seized him by the front of his waistcoat. “But it beats waiting around.”
She dropped him, squealing, into the black.
“Hopefully.”
She dragged the woman from the flames and wedged her, feet-first, into the pit. Clods of earth broke off all around her, and she tumbled out of sight. She shoved the boy in after, watching him slide into darkness.
For a moment Ashlan stood at the edge, watching the oncoming flames gleam in the grimy tendons of her hands.
The hellfire was close enough to make her shiver.
Her nascent fingernails itched as they emerged. New skin was sliding up around the muscle
like sausage casing. She shouldered her bag, flinching from the sizzling and popping of her guts going up.
For a wild moment she thought of staying.
But Hollis was bellowing her name from below.
It probably wouldn’t have killed her.
Ashlan stepped into the darkness.
She’d just pulled the woman and the boy clear of the long, diagonal shaft that led to the bottom, dragging them by their collars toward the sound of the mannikin’s voice, when the hellfire sent a wave of earth and flesh cascading behind her. She couldn’t see a thing, but she could feel rocks and dirt striking her back. Bent double to keep from bashing her head on the tunnel’s low roof, she dragged them farther on.
“Did the junkies live?” Hollis rasped.
“Give me a minute.” Pulling them closer to him, she knelt beside one of them, groping for a pulse. “This one’s all right. Breath’s pretty shallow, though. And the other one’s still hanging on, too.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Well, are you going to carry them?”
“Hmph.” She heard him pressing on, dragging his hand against the wall. “Even if I could help, how do we know it would do us any good? This might well be a dead end, where I’ll languish until you dig your way out. Which would probably be the end of me, at the rate you dig.”
Suffocation wouldn’t slow her down forever, but running out of air would be markedly unpleasant. “Unless it’s the burrow of some giant rodent. A blind mole as big as an elephant.”
She heard his echoing gasp from down the hall. “Or a worm! Some massive, toothy lamprey of the earth.”
He was trotting back already. “Probably looking for voles to eat,” she said. “You’re about the right size.”
Hollis smacked into her leg and clung there. “Do you really think we ought to stay where we are?”
She rolled her eyes, invisibly. “Runt, if we’re figuring the odds between a tunnel collapse and a giant worm attack, I’m going to say we should keep going. You can work on your bestiary of imaginary dirt creatures on the way.”
He shoved away, huffing. “I’m sorry, does the invulnerable woman have something clever to say about cowardice? One day I’ll learn what frightens you, and lower you into a pit of it.”
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